The Week That Was (June 24-30, 2023)

A roundup of what I wrote, read, watched, played, etc. over the past week.

Jul 01, 2023

In this space on Saturday, I do a weekly round-up of sorts: Sifting through what I wrote that you might have missed during the week, what I’ve been reading and watching myself, and some other fun things that have been going on.

Some personal news!

I’ll start with the ✨exciting part✨: I have accepted a new job with The Messenger as their Senior Editor/Writer for Sports Data and Innovation. I’ll be working with a really talented and experienced team led by Dan Kaufman and Jon Scher, writing the kinds of things you’ve been reading here at my Substack — plus longer features, too — while also helping roll out sports data projects. There will be plenty more details to come, as our overall sports section hasn’t formally launched yet, but I’m set to begin contributing my stories to the site the week after next!

The bittersweet part, however, is that this means I will have to stop posting here at Neil’s Substack. 😢 This place was my life raft after being laid off from FiveThirtyEight; it kept me going and provided an outlet for all of the energy and feelings I had built up after leaving a job I’d worked for nearly 10 years. Seeing everyone’s supportive responses after my layoff — and the way people continued to lift me up here at Substack with their subscriptions and encouragement — gave me strength. So it’s going to be weird to not post here and contribute articles for this special community anymore. All I can say is thank you, that each and every reader helped me more than they can ever possibly know, and that I hope you’ll keep reading me at The Messenger going forward.

And for those who generously paid to subscribe for either the next month or the entire year, I will be refunding your payments. If it doesn’t show up in the next handful of weeks — naturally, I happen to be transitioning off of Substack over a bank-holiday weekend (because of course) — email me [neil.paine_at_gmail.com] and I’ll make things right. Thank you again for your support, it truly meant the world to me. 🙏

What I did this week

Stealing a bit from Will Leitch’s newsletter format, here are the things I wrote or podcasted about during the previous week, sorted in descending order by quality, popularity and/or current relevance.

🏀 The Curious Case Of John Collins - After placing him on the trade block for what felt like years, the Atlanta Hawks finally dealt John Collins away (to the Utah Jazz) this week. Collins’ tenure with Atlanta was so puzzling — at one time, the talented 6’9” forward seemed like the perfect No. 2 to Trae Young’s No. 1 as the Hawks began building winning momentum. But Collins’ development stalled out badly over the past 2 seasons, perhaps more than any other similar young player in modern NBA history.
⚾ Domingo Germán's Perfect Game Was A Perfect Reminder That Baseball Is Weird As Hell - Going into Wednesday night’s action, pretty much nothing suggested Domingo Germán was set to throw a perfect game against the Oakland A’s. (Except maybe the A’s being a dumpster fire of the highest order.) But the fact that he did shouldn’t be surprising if we look at the history of who throws perfect games — a bizarre mix of greats, solid pitchers and completely random names.
⚾ 2023's Braves Are Hotter Than The '90s Dynasty Braves Ever Were - The Atlanta Braves are finishing up an unbelievable month of baseball — their June record going into Friday’s game against Miami was 20-4. Amazingly, that’s significantly better than any month the team had during its dynasty era of the ‘90s and early 2000s; you have to go back to the Boston Braves (at 26-5 in September 1914) to find an edition of this franchise with a better record in any month.
🏁🎧 Two Sports Sickos talkin’ all about the Underbird - Episode 7 of
Podracing
— which, by the way, will continue to release despite my new job — saw Tyler and I discuss the Nashville race, honor the greatest No. 7 (Alan Kulwicki with his 1992 “Underbird” run) and baselessly speculate about who might win the very first Chicago street race.
🏒 Erik Karlsson Wants To Play For A Winner. But Can A Winner Use Erik Karlsson? - Sharks defenseman Erik Karlsson had an eventful week: A day before winning the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top D-man, he asked for San Jose to trade him to a contender. So I dug into the fact that Karlsson’s teams have mostly been bad, why his stellar individual stats seldom align with team performance, and whether teams whose best offensive talents are on defense tend to underperform.
🏁 Breaking Down The Odds For NASCAR's Playoff-Bubble Drivers - Similar to what I did for Chase Elliott a few weeks earlier, I used a regressed version of each driver’s career winning percentage on each track type (fudging a little bit to estimate the street-course odds) to calculate the chances of each winless driver picking up a victory before the playoff cutoff on Aug. 26. Some prominent drivers were around 50-50 to grab at least 1 win, but others had much worse odds.

Some stories I didn’t post about this week

🏀 Pretty much every NBA free agency news bomb 💣that happened since Friday afternoon.
⚾ I only “noted” about this, but Shohei Ohtani keeps doing the impossible and making it seem routine. Against the White Sox on Tuesday night, Ohtani both started as a pitcher — striking out 10 and allowing only 1 run in 6⅓ innings — and hit a pair of home runs as a hitter, which… I don’t even know if we have words left to describe how insane it is that one guy is so world-class at both of these things. Ohtani Island has a population of 1:
🏒 Connor Bedard went No. 1 in the NHL draft to the Chicago Blackhawks Wednesday night, making official what we’d known all year long. I can’t speak too much about Bedard’s potential from a rigorous statistical perspective — I’ll leave that to others — but he was far and away the best offensive talent at the World Juniors this year, with 64% more points than the next-best player. I worry a little about Bedard’s size: he’s only 5’10”, shorter than most other great players (though there are exceptions, such as Patrick Kane or Brad Marchand). But the scouts think he’ll be strong enough for that not to matter, and the thought of facing his shot is already keeping NHL goalies up at night.
🏀 I don’t even care that much anymore, because I think his leaving is good for the Sixers long-term (pending what Daryl Morey can get in return), but James Harden has had one of the weirdest and most difficult to decipher careers of any NBA player. Even including ex-Nets teammates Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, I’m not sure anybody has had more theoretical potential and more hand-picked opportunities to win than Harden, and done less with them. What does Harden actually even want at this point? Who knows.

Some interesting things I read and watched this week

⚾ The Chad Innings Eater by Foolish Baseball, YouTube
⚽ Bookmaker's take on USWNT, Brazil, liabilities by Patrick Everson, Fox Sports
🏀 The Converging Roads of Overtime Elite and the G-League Ignite by The Box and One
⚾ "Catching up to his greatness”: The narrowing of the baseball experience by Michael Weinreb, Throwbacks
🗽🏀 Twenty years of frustration all barreling out of us by Alex Shephard, Basketball Feelings
⚾ The Woman MLB Wants To Silence by The Diamond, YouTube
🏁 Formula E is Desperate to Be Singular. It Deserves to Be. by Olivia Hicks, Formula Flash
🏀 Does Glen Rice belong in the Hall of Fame? by Forgotten Player Profiles, YouTube
⌨️ The Biggest Scandal In Speed Typing History by Karl Jobst, YouTube

What I played this week

In this blurb, I post either a video game/board game/etc. that I’ve been playing around with recently. Note: I am not sponsored by these games!

⚾ Digital Diamond Baseball V11 and 🎲 Sophie's Dice

It will come as approximately zero surprise to readers that I love text/stat-based sports simulation games, in just about any form. I’ve already spoken fondly about the MLB and NBA Showdown dice games, and Out Of The Park Baseball as a GM simulator, but this week’s entry is a PC game called Digital Diamond Baseball. It runs about $20 on sale at Steam (until July 13), and has rosters/stats for every team in MLB history — plus an option to update stats in real time for 2023 (which of course I do) — to play as exhibition games, scheduled games as they were played in reality, postseason games, etc. The game has a little bit of a UI learning curve, since my understanding is it was all programmed by one guy as a passion project, but the flip-side is that it’s highly customizable (with the ability to add your own ballpark images/sounds/AI strategy logic/etc) and delivers realistic results within the framework of a Strat-o-Matic style card/outcome sim.

To that last part, the game does have a built-in “dice rolling” mechanic to derive results off of the combined batter-vs-pitcher player cards displayed in the game… but I find it kind of clunky and unsatisfying. (The dice sounds don’t always match up with the outcomes being “rolled”, and it often lags or doesn’t always roll the specified number of times.) So what I usually do is pair DDB with another affordable (it’s $2.49 on sale) Steam program called Sophie’s Dice, which gives you a virtual dice-rolling environment for an infinitely customizable range of different dice. Since DDB requires a roll from 0-999, I either use three D10s (one as the hundreds place, one as the tens and one as the single digits) or a special D20 that Sophie’s Dice can turn into a “D1000” by randomizing each side within a given range (0-49, 50-99, etc) and enter the results under DDB’s “board game companion” mode.

If you can stand the admittedly ridiculous nerdiness of what I just wrote, either option gives great results — and, in my opinion, it helps elevate DDB to feel more like the Strat-o-Matic types of games it is a spiritual successor to (while costing only a small fraction of what Strat-o goes for on the PC with all the season add-ons).